Mycology in Naturopathy

The human body is a perfect machine, made according to nature. Natural therapies bring back the disease system to  a precise cure scheme based on listening to our own body, and based on what nature provides man with, to grant him healing and prevention from energetic unbalances and disharmonies causing disorders. Any natural therapy worth of respect must be preventive, functional, based on natural remedies and on a holistic vision of man meant as an inseparable combination of body and mind. 


Mushrooms neither belong to the plant species, nor they belong to the animal one. They have since ever drawn the attention of man, and they have always been defined “mysterious objects” both because, even if partly vegetable, they do not have roots, leaves, flowers, chlorophyll, and also because of their poisonousness and the hallucinogenic effects some of them provoke. During centuries they have been used for the most different purposes: as cauteries and haemostatics in medicine, as dying stuff to colour fabrics, and as body paints by North American Indians; also as accessories for hairstyles, as tobacco and chewing gum surrogates and as perfumes and soaps.

In the Western World, instead, they have since ever been known and appreciated for their culinary value,  and in recent years they have aroused the interest of science and conventional medicine that had always been suspicious because some specimen are poisonous. 

On the contrary, in the East, and in some other parts of the world too, the therapeutic features of some mushrooms have been known and utilised for millenniums. 

But it is exactly their pharmaceutical aspect which has drawn the attention of scientific research and has conquered it. This is aimed at analysing the beneficial properties mushrooms have on man’s organism with the intention of identifying their pharmacological properties. In the last ten, twenty years, research has come up with a certain amount of information on the bioactive compounds contained in medicinal mushrooms, and on their mechanisms of action, by pointing out their beneficial potentialities.

The capacities of mushrooms to act positively on the immune system are getting more and more evident. They reinforce it and bring it back to its balance, and they get it ready to respond efficiently to the numerous stimuli the organism is submitted to, either coming from the outside or the inside.


Besides, as it has been found out, mushrooms are organisms that have a fundamental role for the environment equilibrium and for man’s health too.

They actually exert a regenerative action both for the ecosystem and man’s organism as well. This is why since a few years ago they have been used to clean up polluted environments, to make the soil more fertile, to make trees grow more quickly. They can protect some cultivations from pathogen agents and environmental stress, thus reducing the consumption of fertilizers and pesticides.

The Kingdom of mushrooms, including also moulds and yeasts, boasts millions of specimen, but only a share of these has so far been studied in order to understand their characteristics and properties.

Mycotherapy has opened up promising research branches, above all as far as the prevention and cure of tumours and degenerative diseases are concerned. It does not go against official medical therapies, but it arises in a completely innovative perspective by promoting complementarity as a valuable integration to the conventional therapies used.